A loving story

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Clare Kermond writes of insight into bitter war from a
family's films.

When Judy Rymer first heard about someone with a great film
idea, she was far from enthusiastic.

Like doctors being shown friends' bad knees or tennis elbows,
meeting people with the perfect movie idea is an occupational
hazard for most directors. Rymer's instinct was wrong.

As well as a pitch for a new film, Vietnamese-born Therase Tran
arrived at Rymer's office with boxes of beautifully preserved home
movies dating to the 1960s, filmed in Vietnam before and after the
1975 fall of Saigon.

Rymer says seeing them was "like opening a box of jewels". The
super-eight movies were much more than family happy snaps, they
were personal records of Charles Tran Van Lam, South Vietnam's
foreign minister at the height of the war.

When she first began opening the films, Rymer was convinced
about the rights and wrongs of the Vietnam War. She had marched in
protests with thousands of others in Australia, calling for the US
and its allies to get out of Vietnam.

"We knew Nixon was bad and we should not have been there."

But as she poured over Lam's films, the ground shifted beneath
her feet.

"I thought I understood the Vietnam War. The protest movement
was focused on getting the US out of Vietnam and, however that
happened, we saw it as a victory. Now I realise that the South
Vietnamese were largely forgotten by people like me," she says.

Lam's films and memorabilia gave a powerful new insight into the
war, but Rymer says they told another, equally strong story, that
of the lives of Lam's nine children. Raised in colonial South
Vietnam in an affluent political family, the children were
scattered around the world when Saigon fell.

Rymer's film, All Points of the Compass, uses the
wonderful home movies to give a picture of an idyllic family life:
children build sand castles on the beach, little boys in sailor
suits put on concerts for brothers and sisters.

The older children leave for boarding schools overseas, to be
educated in French or English.

After the war began in 1965, the films show the children playing
at being soldiers.

When Saigon fell, Lam was among those airlifted from the US
embassy roof - most of his children were already overseas.

Rymer met the nine siblings, uncovering their stories after the
family was split up, and learning how they have maintained an
incredibly strong bond.

"They found themselves without family, without parents, in
cultures that were in some cases hostile. This was terrible and the
amazing ability they had to keep their family values and family
cohesion is uplifting."

Therase Tran, the "number six sister", speaks quietly and laughs
a lot. She came to Australia in 1972 to join an older sister at a
Sydney boarding school.

Lam had been Vietnam's first ambassador to Australia and held
the country in high regard. After the fall of Saigon, Therase and
her sister had no more money for boarding schools, so they went to
Canberra and enrolled in the local high school, living off money
from waitressing.

Speaking from Sydney, where she works at the ABC, Therase Tran
says it took her six months to convince her brothers and sisters to
agree to make the film. In the Confucian way, the oldest sister Mai
had the final say.

While each sibling was interviewed, they promised Rymer not to
talk about the process with each other.

"Really we felt very grateful about the film and rather
surprised that there was such a strong thread to it," she says.

Therase says for the family, who now live in Scotland, Canada,
the US and Australia, the motivation for the film was a tribute to
their father.

Lam and his wife came here as refugees, opening a 12-seat cafe
in Canberra, where they lived until his death in 2002.

She says she hopes that those who watch the film will gain a
better understanding of the Vietnam War but also of the plight of
refugees anywhere in the world.